My food is "just"! Just meaning honest, no bullshit! It is also easy to prepare, you don't need to be a pro to cook my recipes - and most important: its all about taste - they are delicious.

For the past twenty years, I have been travelling across Asia, Africa and the Americas, collecting amazing impressions on the local foods of so many different cultures. In my recipes, you will find those influences and flavors which I collected during all those years.

Barbieri? That was my great grandmother - she was a star in the kitchen. Why I named this blog after her? Well, her name just sounds better.

As I am travelling a lot, you will find suggestions of restaurants on this blog as well.

Dec 19 pastrami

Pastrami, this delicious meat you can enjoy at Katz in New York, was initially exported from Romania and then, as a Jewish dish, imported to the US where it is until today a delicacy. The meat (beef brisket usually) is brined for a week and then smoked for 7 hours. In earlier times, this method was used to preserve meat when the possibilities of cooling techniques were not as developed as today.

Try your own pastrami, your friends will love it!

Ingredients:

2 kg Brisket (without fat)

For the curing process:

15g curing salt

100g brown sugar

2 TBS black pepper

1 TBS spicy paprika

2 TBS coriander powder

1 TBS garlic powder

1 TBS mustard seeds

1 TS Ginger powder

Later, once the meat is cured:

5 TBS pepper (3 black and two colored)

2 TBS coriander powder

Mix well the above ingredients and rub on the meat – be sure to rub all sides of the meat and cover it neatly – then put the meat in a plastic bag, or even better, vacuum it in a vacuum bag. Place in a deep dish and put into the fridge for seven days. Once per day you have to turn the bag in order for the meat to be cured regularly.

After seven days, take out the meat and rinse well, then place into a deep dish with water and let it sit there for about an hour. Change the water twice or thrice. Now dry the meat well with kitchen paper and set aside.

In the blender, mix the peppers until coarse, not too fine, and mix in the coriander powder. Rub it well on all sides of the meat, then place it on a grill. Put in the oven for 7 hours at 80 degrees Celsius.

In order to get the smoking flavor of real pastrami, I improvised a smoker in my oven. In an old cake mold, I burned wooden chiplets from Weber. When I had a fire, I added humid chiplets on top and waited for it to develop a nice smoke. Then I placed my improvised smoke-device into the oven and just left it there for the entire time.

After seven hours, take out the meat and cut in slices, as thin as possible. I eat the pastrami as a Sandwich, in bread, with hot Dijon mustard and pickled cucumbers.